NCID-0927
Jean Paul deGuzman
Lecturer
University of California, Los Angeles
Education/Degree:
1 History (UCLA)
About
Jean-Paul R. Contreras deGuzman is an historian of the 20th century US with a focus on comparative and relational racialization, urban history, Asian Americans and, most recently, American Buddhism. A specialist in multiethnic Los Angeles, particularly the history of the San Fernando Valley, his writing appears in Amerasia Journal, California History, Journal of Urban History, Southern California Quarterly, The History Teacher (forthcoming), Journal of Asian American Studies (forthcoming) and various anthologies in ethnic, urban, and religious studies. Dr. deGuzman teaches US history and research methods at Windward School and Asian American Studies and LA history at the University of California, Los Angeles where he earned the university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award. He holds a PhD in History from UCLA and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California Center for New Racial Studies.
Current Work
"Dr. deGuzman's book manuscript tentatively titled, ""A Touch of Danger: Southern California's San Fernando Valley and the Racial Politics of an American Dream,"" uses metropolitan Los Angeles as a microcosm to explore the cultural expressions, racial anxieties, and material aspirations, that gripped the United States from World War II to the present. As the first racially comparative study of the San Fernando Valley region of LA, it draws upon scores of oral histories, government documents, and mainstream and grassroots media to triangulate the strategies communities of color used to upend the racism embedded in the exclusionary laws and spatial development of the region. From large-scale cultural projects to ballot box politics, to outright rebellion, these strategies were the outcome of shared and divergent histories of global migration and patterns of racialization.
His second research project explores the intersections between racial justice and post-WWII American Buddhism."